Beatosu and Goblu were two made-up Ohio paper towns, inserted into the 1978–79 official map of the neighbouring state of Michigan. OK, this one doesn’t have much to do with copyright at all. There are other idiosyncrasies, too – for a while, Haggerston park appeared to have its own ski slope: Beatosu and Goblu Most are small, connecting streets between larger arteries, such as Moat Lane in Finchley. London’s trap streetsĪccording to a BBC2 programme broadcast in 2005, London’s A-Z street atlas contains around 100 “trap streets”: made-up roads used to trick imitators. It’s assumed that this was a matter of avoiding imitation – though the coincidence of its drafter’s name, Richard Ciacci, suggests ego might have had something to do with it, too. It was near “Agloe” on the map, so its owners named it “Agloe General Store”. In 1950, a general store was built in the area. In the 1930s, cartographers placed a non-existent town called Agloe on a map of Delaware county, New York state. This example is particularly uncanny, as the fake settlement (often called a “paper town”) actually became a reality. These are small errors or jokes buried somewhere in the map, which act as a kind of watermark for the map-maker: fake towns, say, or imaginary streets. This is great for map companies, but less great for those of us led astray by their mistakes. So, to protect their work, many cartographers fall back on a simple trick: “easter eggs”. Could any of us spot a paper town today? (Photo by Cristina Conti/Shutterstock) If you’re just documenting what’s already there, there’s nothing to stop other map-makers copying your work – and, if you’re as accurate as you’d like to be, you’d have no way to prove that they’d done so. The reason for this actually stems from maps’ very purpose: that is, their attempts to accurately represent the world around us.

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